this is fun.Better than just waiting til tomorrow

from the moment we get the "hobgoblin" stuff we all know it's either for the Doctor, or there's another Doctor in it already

the Doctor carrying on not knowing is just to keep us in suspense, or in the context of the plot, to keep the Alliance guessing too

or ....never mind coffee time

very strange he never spotted the Autons when not trusting what you see has been such a theme, and the Rory business too

he never reacted to River telling him it was a trap, but to be fair, he didn't have time

I'm not going to bother reading 46 pages of posts - I've been off on holiday for a week and only just able to see The Pandorica Opens. But yes, unquestionably excellent, for all the reasons that other people have said that I haven't read.

Loved the set-up of Rory's return as 'just an amazing thing that we're going to gloss over', just like you would do if you can't come up with a good reason, and then it turns out there's a FANTASTIC explanation. And Amy trying to help Rory persuade himself that he was in control was a brilliant echo of the Bracewell scene - I know a lot of people had disliked the 'convincing a robot he's real' but this took the same idea to the n-th degree.

Ah, Rory and Amy - boy meets girl, girl makes boy dress up as imaginary friend, boy falls in love with girl, girl runs off with imaginary friend, imaginary friend brings girl back, girl falls in love with boy, boy gets killed, girl forgets boy, boy comes back to life, girl remembers boy, boy kills girl.

How many times have we heard such a classic story?

A wonderful, amazing finale to a wonderful, amazing series. Bravo, Steven Moffat!

I could sit here all night writing what I loved about it, but it’s much easier to list my two major criticisms:

1. No strong, clear villain or foe.
I can enjoy a story with no real villain (Vincent and The Doctor being a good recent example), but when you have an epic episode like this that set us up to expect lots of alien threats (including what was inside the Pandorica), the lack of any real foe left me feeling a little short-changed. As well as this, the main threat of the episode (the universe being erased) was weakened by the fact that the episode didn’t clearly tell us who was responsible for it or exactly why it was happening. It would have been more dramatic if, say, the Daleks were the ones who deliberately brought about the destuction of the universe; or if poor Rory did it by accident.

2. The plot was too abstract for my tastes.
The events in part 1 may have been far-fetched (this is sci-fi after all), but they were fairly well grounded in logic and plausibility. However, for me, the events in part 2 (particularly the conclusion) seemed too arbitrary and without solid explanation. I loved seeing the Doctor rewinding through time, but I felt it was too much of a stretch, and lacked solid explanation.

I just hope Steven Moffat will bear two things in mind for the next series:

1. Big, epic episodes like this really need a strong, central baddie.
2. Keep things 100% logical. Even if that means just putting a few more lines of exposition in to help us understand it.

But it wasn't abstract-it was all explained! All that remains unresolved is the identity of the individual who caused the TARDIS to explode, and that's setting us up for next year. If they'd revealed it this year it would have ruined next year's story arc, surely?

You did note the "too abstract in my taste" part? Or is this going to be an argument over opinions?

Personally, I was wondering if I consider it "abstract" or something else but I too didn't think the resolution was that brilliant. It was reasonably enjoyable but not more or less than previous finals. For my taste, I found a lot of the series and the final very clever in setup. Yet it didn't really capture me because the parts that compounded the resolutions (either in episodes like Beast, Victory, AC, etc.) I felt were improbable (even for DW/sci-fi) and even somewhat implausible (emotional triggers being my pet annoyance throughout).

But lots of ppl seem to enjoy it this way, fair enough, but that still doesn't invalidate the views of people who feel differently.

Certain things may have been explained (like the fact that the Doctor would be the only one to be erased because he was inside the pandorica), but for me it was still all a bit too abstract. It was just “this is how it is because the Doctor says so” rather than the audience feeling it was inevitable and logical.

There were also a bunch of things I didn’t feel we had a good explanation for, such as:

• If the universe was being slowly erased, why did everything on earth remain unchanged for 2,000 years then suddenly start to go?
• Why did the Doctor start travelling back through his own history when he was being erased?
• Why did he travel to those particular moments and not others?
• Why was he invisible, yet able to speak to Amy?
• How could Amy remember what the Doctor told her if he never existed to tell her in the first place?
• What prompted the Doctor to suddenly turn up at Amy’s wedding? Did she “imagine him into existence?” What were the mechanics behind that?
• Why was River Song hanging around at Amy’s wedding and why give Amy the book? If River could also remember the Doctor then what was the point of the Doctor doing all that work to get Amy to remember him? What was so special about River that made her able to remember him?
• If the Doctor never existed, why was the earth there when he wouldn’t have been there to save it many times?
• What version of Rory was this? Was this the original Rory, or did this version also somehow remember being an android Roman (as the episode implies)? If so, how?

I’m not saying none of these questions can’t be answered, or weren’t answered by the episode. I’m just saying this all put the viewer in the position of having to infer a lot, and for me it was a little too much. I like things to happen logically, rather than just being told “this is how it is because the Doctor says so and it’s just a given fact of the story”. I think my imagination can only tolerate so many “givens” in one episode.

That'll be a yes then!

Odd that this thread is so quiet, just two days after such a big episode.

This is the thread for 'The Pandorica Opens'.

The 'Big Bang' thread is down there:

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Regards,

Cypher

Just rewatched this on BBC 3.

True. TV. Brilliance.

Really thought someone had created the thread for The Impossible Astronaut then

So did I for a moment lol

Correct.

actually this does raise an interesting point: whoever starts the episode thread has to do so with a poll attached, which does make it rather difficult to start the thread early....